3 ms·

> TLDR: 4x slowdown in the normal case 4x slower isn't the normal case. 4x is at the upper end of the overheads you'll see.

geraldog 1y ago
That's good to know! C is immensely powerful, portable and probably as fast as you can go without hand-coding in the architecture-specific assembly. Most of the world's information systems (our cyberstructure) rely directly or indirectly on C. And don't get me wrong, I'm a great enthusiast of the idea of sticking to memory-safe languages like Rust from now on. The hard truth is will live with legacy C code, period. Pizlo's heroic effort bridges the gap so to speak, it kind of sandboxes userspace C in a way that inherently adds memory safety to legacy code. There are only a few corner cases now that can't be bothered by any slow-down vis-a-vis unsafe C, and the great majority of code across every industry would benefit much more from the reduced surface of exposure.
thw_9a83c 1y ago
> 4x is at the upper end of the overheads This is already quite impressive. Many automatic memory managed languages have more than 4x worst-case slowdown. E.g. Google-backed Golang is ~1.5× to ~4× slower than optimized C++. I suppose there are many ways to further speed-up Fil-C if more resources were given to the project.
- hyghjiyhu 1y ago
  This seems likely. I would assume that the vast majority of memory access can be statically proven safe if you throw enough money at the problem, meaning the bookkeeping can be eliminated.
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    > I would assume that the vast majority of memory access can be statically proven safe if you throw enough money at the problem, meaning the bookkeeping can be eliminated. You can't really do this without adding the same sorts of annotations as Rust or Safe C++. Especially if you care about keeping modular/separate compilation and code reuse.
    - hyghjiyhu 1y ago
      You can do it without annotations if you only do it as an optimization that's not guaranteed to succeed.
      - zozbot234 1y ago
        If it's not guaranteed to succeed it's not really memory safe. The subset that can be fully optimized without any annotations is really limited, more like writing old-style FORTRAN or COBOL code where you don't dynamically allocate at all to begin with. It may be "safe" but it's also not really helpful.
jacquesm 1y ago
I'd love to see some practical benchmarks for programs such as grep and other binutils. I'm also pretty curious if it turns up any bugs in them in use.

geraldog 1y ago

That's good to know! C is immensely powerful, portable and probably as fast as you can go without hand-coding in the architecture-specific assembly. Most of the world's information systems (our cyberstructure) rely directly or indirectly on C. And don't get me wrong, I'm a great enthusiast of the idea of sticking to memory-safe languages like Rust from now on. The hard truth is will live with legacy C code, period. Pizlo's heroic effort bridges the gap so to speak, it kind of sandboxes userspace C in a way that inherently adds memory safety to legacy code. There are only a few corner cases now that can't be bothered by any slow-down vis-a-vis unsafe C, and the great majority of code across every industry would benefit much more from the reduced surface of exposure.

thw_9a83c 1y ago

> 4x is at the upper end of the overheads This is already quite impressive. Many automatic memory managed languages have more than 4x worst-case slowdown. E.g. Google-backed Golang is ~1.5× to ~4× slower than optimized C++. I suppose there are many ways to further speed-up Fil-C if more resources were given to the project.

hyghjiyhu 1y ago
This seems likely. I would assume that the vast majority of memory access can be statically proven safe if you throw enough money at the problem, meaning the bookkeeping can be eliminated.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  > I would assume that the vast majority of memory access can be statically proven safe if you throw enough money at the problem, meaning the bookkeeping can be eliminated. You can't really do this without adding the same sorts of annotations as Rust or Safe C++. Especially if you care about keeping modular/separate compilation and code reuse.
  - hyghjiyhu 1y ago
    You can do it without annotations if you only do it as an optimization that's not guaranteed to succeed.
    - zozbot234 1y ago
      If it's not guaranteed to succeed it's not really memory safe. The subset that can be fully optimized without any annotations is really limited, more like writing old-style FORTRAN or COBOL code where you don't dynamically allocate at all to begin with. It may be "safe" but it's also not really helpful.

jacquesm 1y ago

I'd love to see some practical benchmarks for programs such as grep and other binutils. I'm also pretty curious if it turns up any bugs in them in use.